by Lucy Corin
The next was a Decadent Hedon, hunched under a burlap robe, but I could tell by the way the folds fell that he was leaning on a crook: “Appearance” (my mother reading this time), “slothful, bloated, swarthy, indolent, irresolute, fair hair, eburnated protrusions, overall sour.” His sleeve slipped and showed a hand, but immediately he shifted just enough for the cloth to cover it again. He had long nails. “Medical history: succumbed to the folly of the idle rich. Discovered inebriated at a marina.” My mother read it like a schoolchild, or a schoolteacher, that voice. Even though the Decadent Hedon ignored us, I felt embarrassed with my parents reading as if he wasn’t there. I kept trying to look at him in a way that would let him know. Then I thought, What, should we not read the information? That’s when I said, “Hello, I’m Alice.” I didn’t expect any one thing or another. On impulse I guess I thought he might appreciate it.
“Fantastico,” said the madman, rolling his eyes either at me or because that’s what madmen do. The tone, though, was pretty obviously “You know what I mean, you pawn/idiot/cracker/et cetera.”
I thought of our shed and the curtains from my bedroom. I knew a madman like that wouldn’t like me. He didn’t say anything else, in fact he went right back to not acknowledging that we were there, just gazed, lazy-eyed, as if over a vast tabletop, through the wall behind me, through the waiting area beyond it, and out over the hills and valleys of whatever the hell he thought of the world.
I felt ashamed that I wanted so badly for my madman to like me. Like this was all about me. Which it was. I was the one coming of age.
I don’t know how I got us to the next one. Oh, yes I do: my mother said, “Honey, have a look at this.”
This one was Contemporary Bipolar. Like two for one. He was low, now, “sickly, peevish, having suffered a recent rejection of a manuscript he’d sent to an important publisher.” I’m paraphrasing what my father read. They’d found him holding court in a city park, where everyone called him Professor, wearing round glasses with no glass in them. He had this enthusiastic teenage boy who’d follow him around with an apple crate to stand on. Mom observed that you could tell different doctors wrote up the information cards. She said this one had been in a creative mood. The conclusion of the medical history was that this madman was the son of a lowly cleaning lady and had never been to college. It marveled that he could be so erudite in his philosophies, though the doctor confessed he had not heard of many of the figures the madman liked to quote. He was not sure if this was a measure of his own ignorance, as he had only taken introductory courses in the classics, and although he had done very well in them, it had been a long time ago. My father attempted a knowing glance at my mother, which she rejected. He whispered to me, “Next thing you know, that doctor’s gonna be eating a madeline.”
I said, “What are you talking about?” and then I felt bad.
Next there was a woman madman: “with monstrous breasts, contorted, black”—actually, the madmen were a variety of races and racial mixtures, but this card pointed out black for some reason—“eyes bulging, head and arms thrown back, clothes discarded on the floor” (all noted on the card, as well as true to my observation), “with a madman’s staff, clenching hands, found biting her own arm, broken out of chains, bold, brazen, brainless”; then a Cretin, with his wiener in a bottle, peeing, then holding the bottle up and looking in it with a monocle (“He’s imitating his physician,” my father interpreted, “monkey see monkey do”; to which my mother flashed him a look about insensitively using a monkey analogy and he said, “I’m just explaining!”); a Cuckold wearing a Cuckold’s horns, I don’t know what they were made out of but they looked real; a Schizo-affective who on his card it said “mute” and explained that like so many, he’d latched on, in an early delusion, to where the Bible says, “if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out,” a sentence which, gathering from my education, has resulted in madmen missing just about every body part you can think of, but this madman had cut his tongue out, and then, to cauterize it, stuffed a flaming torch down his throat. Mom: “Cauterize means seal up”; me: “I know,” but I didn’t. Then a Possessed guy with landscape tattoos. Then a short guy evolving into a divine being, officially Monomaniac, with sticks stuck into his hair like a crown, trying to look down on us. Next a Wildman dragging a club, with a face like a “panther or a goat,” this heavy lumpy body, like he’d broken everything and healed back wrong; then a Phlegmatic, “sad, recumbent, forgetful, pale, eating the bread of the workers of iniquity… protruding eyes, weak chin, terror”; and next a rich girl whose secret lover had joined the army and died. Then Frenetic. Fevered delirium, “raving but seated, ready to be purged.” Drawings on one wall of his cell showed a warden after a patient with a billy club and a doctor after a patient with a needle, and on another wall a drawing of being looked at by two tall people with a short one. The one with most detail I recognized from our textbook: an operation to remove the Stone of Folly. The doctor had given the madman the stone just cut from his head, and the madman held it in the air like a jewel. The drawing showed it glinting with light. The drawings were good, considering they’d been done with a stick and fingers and who knows what for paint.
I got dizzy on and off through the madmen, partly because all the iron in my body was rushing out between my legs but also because of the madness. After the Recumbent Frenetic was a pair of cells each containing a Fool, dancing, a man fool and next door to him a woman fool: one with a feather headdress, one with bells around the wrists and ankles. Lighthearted types, goiter on the neck of one, one with a pink balloon on a branch of a bifurcated stick, counterparts dancing like mirror images—how could they know through the wall? It didn’t make sense to look at them individually, but I couldn’t see both cells at once. The gallery was too narrow, I couldn’t back up enough, so I looked from one to the other trying, but it made me feel seasick. I felt at odds with myself, that phrase came to me. Like I was related to whatever invisible puppet master was making them dance together when they couldn’t even see each other. I think I spent less time with them than anyone, but the effect went straight to my body.
Plus there was the madman in the cell right after them.
This one had an information card that folded out like an accordion. “At sixteen,” my father read, “she became insane over the favor her older sister received from a young man, her husband, so that she was institutionalized.”
“Whose husband?” my mother asked. “Who lets these people write?” My mother had continued her commentary all through the gallery; I’d just tuned most of it out. But the point here is this madman’s huge long history:
“Periodic manias, daily three to six in the afternoon. Much of the day she behaved normally, but from noon until three sank into the deepest melancholy. Following that she would become lively, and at exactly three in the afternoon she would get a fit of rage and smash everything, attack her attendants and drink enormous amounts of ice water. At six she would become calm again. Taken in by a family when she was seventeen, who, within a year, interrupted three suicide attempts with a silk cord.” My mother, again concerned with grammar, wondered how the family might have used a silk cord thusly. But the story went that the girl was finally found so dead she was almost black (I hadn’t known this about death), but they revived her, and while they were deciding what to do with her next, she disappeared. Turned out she wanted to be a dancer, which I used to want to be myself, and started working at strip clubs by night and taking dance classes by day and through her stripper and dance friends met up with a troupe of trapeze artists who went across the country and Europe, meeting up with circuses and innovative performing groups, putting on intense acts that, for certain invite-only audiences, were rumored to contain explicit sex with emotional and intellectual depth. A distinguished artist within this community, her prison record called it Live Queer Porn. “And yet,” said the account, “such transgressions often bear the germs of healing in them.”
Then something happened. The accou
nt said: “suddenly.” Suddenly she quit the troupe, burned her costumes, wrapped herself in rags, took up a staff of madness decorated with shells, strung a crucifix around her neck, and joined a group of pilgrims on their way to Rome. They were a whole group of people who felt bad about themselves so they went to Rome, but when they got there, the girl threw her rags into the Tiber and wouldn’t go into the cathedral. She slept in the Colosseum for months. Then something else happened which I forgot, and probably they skipped some stuff, and she ended up at a mission taking care of orphans even though she refused to wear the crucifix or explain what she was praying, which she was allowed to do because she’d impressed all the religious people, one of whom eventually fell in love with her, ruining his career, but she wasn’t interested in him like that, and this whole episode seemed to wear her out, so she kissed her orphans goodbye one by one and then left on a boat in the night, which wrecked in a storm near Messina, where she washed up and was taken in by a group of shepherds—her feet were all cut up—until she could walk, by which time the local doctor had fallen for her and kept inventing medical problems so she’d stay. But once she figured that out, he just left everything and went with her through a junglelike landscape until one night they were accosted. She cut the thumbs off the assailant and escaped, but the doctor was killed. There was definitely some more religion, stone temples, shamans and stuff, Amazons, and a battle she helped win with poison she discovered in local sap, but she started drinking heavily and rather than admit her addiction to her tribe, she slunk into the jungle where she lived on fruit and roots—that’ll dry you out—and then something else and she ended up here, in godforsaken nowhere California, after an episode not far from my school actually, where she had been “excessively frightened by soldiers” is how the write-up put it, please note the air quotes which are so annoying but I’m serious because I believe I’ve heard about those assholes.
You’d think she’d look like a model but she didn’t—she was plump and ordinary, with small features and a round, almost silly nose, her eyes and skin sort of pulled out of place a fraction. And you’d think to have done all those things she’d be old, but she seemed more like she could be my sister just done with college with a place of her own. My mother said the doctors were obviously believing her delusions, and she was going to ask the cat-eyed nurse if this was some kind of test, but god, Mom, can’t you just have an interesting life? Or is it like everyone really does end up with one of four kinds of cars and one of four kinds of house and one of four kids you met in junior high?
Obviously, this is the madman I wanted. Obviously, my mother said no.
I’m paraphrasing.
This is my day, I told her. This is the one day that of all days is my day and it’s not up to you. This decision is going to make me who I am. The woman madman, round and rosy, watched me yelling at my mother with a small smile on her face, looking somewhere between our yelling heads. I don’t know what my father was doing. I was so angry. Sometimes when I get really angry, I get really articulate. I said exactly what I was thinking, exactly the way I would want to have said it. But it doesn’t matter if you’re right, if you made your case, and it doesn’t matter if god, somewhere, is on your side. Whatever happens, happens anyway. My mother said obviously they were trying to pawn this madman off, otherwise why would her case history be ten times longer than anyone else’s? I said I didn’t care if it was all lies, I loved her. I said I felt inspired and connected, at which point the rosy woman looked at me like I was crazy, and her eyes went right into mine, and I could feel my feelings flaring behind my eyes, just as her feelings were flaring behind hers, lighting them up, so I knew we were both lit up, so I knew at least in that way I was right.
Well, that’s what it was like at the time. I don’t know. You get caught up in a moment.
It seemed real.
I said okay, whatever, I’ll take the dancing Fools. My mother was so mad her lips had disappeared. I still don’t know where my father was. And I don’t know what the madmen were thinking of all this yelling. They’ve seen it all, anyway. I could sort of hear some laughing, but who knows at what, and again the acoustics. Me and my mom having out this scene, and in front of a completely undeterminable audience, if that’s even a word. When we were finally silent and I finally looked at her again, she was building up to say something and then swallowing it and then building up again. When she finally said it, she said it like it was the worst, meanest thing she could possibly say.
“You are on your own” is what she finally pronounced, and because she said it to be the meanest possible thing to say, it was.
As we learned in class, when madness comes, it comes up the spine and radiates. Madman after madman has described it this way through history, often saying they were touched by god. Of course that’s not what I felt from my mother—boy, she would love that—but my point is it was very physical receiving her words, like being iced over and then cracked. I thought of madness while I felt it. Then she stormed away down the hall, which would have had more of the abrupt effect she was after except the hall was so long she kind of dissipated down it. Plus, after a couple minutes of me watching her recede, still gasping from how mean she was, my father appeared from behind me and followed after her like a can trailing a car when you just got married. Boom went the double doors, way far away, or whoosh or something. I don’t even remember, but it seemed to let noise out from behind the scenes, and even though I know the doors went to the waiting room, what came out was what you’d expect from those vast back rooms that spilled down the hill behind the asylum: babbling, screaming.
The whole idea is you take in a madman and that teaches you about Facing the Incomprehensible and Understanding Across Difference, and soon we are one big family. Without looking at her again, I left my place in front of the cell of the rosy woman I’d wanted and stared into the cell of the Imbecile who was next. What had he been doing through all that with his lumpy head and beaky honker? It felt like a betrayal to even stand there, to even try to imagine who he was, so I turned around.
Turning around meant I faced a white wall. It occurred to me that I was seeing exactly what all the madmen see, but without the bars. What’s that developmental stage called when you can finally do abstract thinking? Algebra? Just kidding.
I didn’t want to look at any more madmen. I sat down on the floor. I kept looking at the wall. It was so white.
Then the double doors swung open and smacked the walls with an echoing bang, and then thump thump came the cat-eyed nurse with her outward-reaching hair and rubber shoes making squeaks every few steps. Hands came waving through bars as she stomped toward me, though as she neared I could see she wasn’t angry at all, or stomping, it was just the sound of moving down that unpredictable gallery. Some hands she slapped five or did twinkle fingers with, and quips went back and forth that I couldn’t hear. She got to me and stood with her hands on her hips and gazed down at me mock-somethingly, which got me sheepish, as I’m sure she intended.
“You seriously want the Dancing Fools,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That I would not have predicted.” She walked a little circle around me, shaking her red mane, and I pretended I wasn’t freaked out to look at her, and after a few seconds of pretending, it was true. I’m not freaked out by a cat, I thought, and I’m not freaked out by a nurse. So where’s the problem? That’s where I was, emotionally. “Do you dare me to give you the Fools?” she asked.
“No, I don’t dare you, it’s just what I pick.”
She stopped and crouched next to me. She was wearing orange tights with her white uniform and I hadn’t even noticed it before. Now that the rest of her was normal, the tights could look crazy.
“Look, miss. I get ‘rude’ all day from people like them,” she said. “Do you think I need ‘rude’ from you?” I could feel her looking at me, but no matter how much of a problem I didn’t have with her I could not look directly into those fucked-up golden orbs of doom, and j
ust like that, her life stretched before me: one endless gallery of madmen seen as if through a keyhole because of my catty eyes. I had one cat-eyed kid left from a litter lost tragically, and a husband always out on the prowl.
I’m kidding.
What happened is off I hopped from my high horse because she was nice, she was right about me, and I didn’t need to understand her back.
She pulled a small spiral notebook from the front pocket of her skirt. There was a list of names in handwriting that looked like calligraphy: Bobo, Kai, Armand, Kelly. “These are all fine choices, and they all like you fine,” she said. I hadn’t seen any of them yet. They were farther down the gallery. Maybe there was an information card on me. The kingdom of the mad is inexhaustible, as they say. I knew a kid once whose parents were against the madman system, and he got out of it by spending summers building houses for the poor and taking a test on human rights history. I was glad my parents weren’t around to interfere, but I still thought of that kid’s parents, parents like one thing, like conjoined twins, but reverse: of two bodies and one mind.
Then suddenly I thought I felt blood spilling out of me and I stood up in a panic, like a rabbit on the highway, no idea which way to go. It was awful. Along with my boots, I was wearing brown pants that were plain but just cut really nice for my body, but I hadn’t been thinking, when I put them on, about my period and all that could happen. I had no idea what would happen with this color pants if I leaked. The madman in the cell behind me, the imbecile with the head and the beak, who at some point had snuggled up with his sheet on his cot and was possibly sleeping, sat up with a jerk and said, in a voice that sounded not like an imbecile talking back to a dream, not like an imbecile at all: “No, please, not me. I’ll do anything. I’ve got a bad feeling about you.”
